Nine hacked to death in latest Chinese school attack

AN attacker with a cleaver hacked to death seven children and two adults at a kindergarten in north-west China yesterday, the latest in a string of savage assaults on the country’s schools. Eleven other children were wounded.

The killer, 48-year-old Wu Huanming, returned home after the attack on the outskirts of the city of Hanzhong and took his own life, the local government reported.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Wu owned the property used by the school and had argued with the school’s manager, who was among the victims.

It was the fifth major assault on young students in China since late March and occurred despite increased security at schools countrywide, with gates and security cameras installed at some schools and additional police and guards posted at entrances.

The latest deaths were sure to fuel speculation about why assailants – usually lone males – are targeting schools.

Sociologists say the recent attacks that have killed 17 and wounded more than five dozen reflect the tragic consequences of ignoring mental illness and rising stress resulting from huge social inequalities in China’s fast-changing society.

“The perpetrators have contracted a ‘social psychological infectious disease’ that shows itself in a desire to take revenge on society,” said Zhou Xiaozheng of Beijing’s Renmin University.

After past attacks authorities have banned or limited media coverage, and early reports on yesterday’s attack were removed from Chinese websites or moved to less prominent pages. There was no mention of it on state television’s national evening news report.

The attack began at about 8.20am, as children were arriving at the private Shengshui Temple Kindergarten in Hanzhong’s Nanzheng county, a Hanzhong government statement said. The area is on the city’s rural outskirts in a relatively poor part of the country, and images posted on the internet showed the school, which had only about 20 students, housed in a tumbledown two-storey farmhouse.

Wu killed the school’s manager, 50-year-old Wu Hongying, and a student on the spot, then hacked at 18 others. Six students and Wu Hongying’s 80-year-old mother later died in the hospital, the reports said. None of the 11 others hospitalised was in immediate danger, it said.

The string of school assaults began with an attack on a primary school in March in the city of Nanping in Fujian province where eight children were slashed to death by a former community clinic doctor with a history of mental health problems. Since then, dozens have been wounded in similar attacks.